More Than This (5 page)

He tips the can back into his mouth. The soup has gelatinized and tastes heavily of iron, but it also tastes of chicken noodle, a flavor he’s suddenly so grateful for that he starts laughing as he’s slurping down the noodles.

Then he also senses that he’s crying a bit more, too.

He finishes the can and sets it down with a firm thud.

Stop this,
he thinks.
Pull yourself together. What do you need to do here? What’s the next thing to do?
He stands a little straighter.
What would Gudmund do?

And then, for the first time in this place, Seth smiles, small and fleeting, but a smile.

“Gudmund would have a piss,” he croaks.

Because that is indeed what he needs to do next.

He turns back toward the dark, dusty sitting room.

No. Not yet. He can’t face that quite yet.
Definitely
can’t face stumbling up the darkened stairs to the bathroom at the top of the first landing.

He turns to the door to the backyard – back
garden,
he remembers, that’s what the English call it, what his parents always called it. It takes him a few frustrating minutes to get the lock unstuck, but then he steps out into the sunshine again, across the deck his father had built one summer.

The fences of the neighbors on either side seem amazingly close after all the space his family had ended up with in their American house. The lawn itself is now a forest of wheaty-looking stalks and weeds nearly as high as Seth’s head, even as he stands on the low deck. At the back fence, Seth can only just see the top of the old concrete bomb shelter, standing there in its brave arch since World War II. His mother had turned it into a potter’s shed, which she never used all that much, and it quickly became a place to store old bikes and broken furniture.

The embankment beyond the back fence rises up to a gnarled wall of barbed wire. He can’t see any farther than that because of how the land angles down behind it.

But Seth doesn’t think this would be hell if the prison weren’t still there.

He averts his eyes and steps to the edge of the deck. He leans forward a bit and waits to pee out into the tall grass.

And waits.

And waits.

And grunts with the effort.

And waits a bit more.

Until at last, with a heartfelt cry of relief, he sends a poisonously dark yellow stream into the yard.

And almost immediately calls out in pain. It’s like peeing acid, and he looks down at himself in distress.

Then he looks closer.

There are small cuts, small abrasions and marks all across the skin of his groin and hips. He finds a stray piece of white tape tangled in his thickest body hair and a larger one farther down his exposed thigh.

With a wince, he finishes urinating, and starts examining his body more closely in the sunlight. There are numerous cuts and scrapes in the crooks of both his arms, and a line of them up the side of either buttock. He starts pulling at the bandages around his torso, trying to see underneath them. The adhesive is strong, but it finally gives. There’s a strange metallic foil on the inside of each bandage, and it comes away in a sticky mess, tearing off a few chest hairs he never thought much of anyway. The same is true for the bandages on his arms and legs. He works and works at them, leaving behind painful bald spots and finding more abrasions and cuts.

He keeps at it until he completely rids himself of them, coiling them there on the deck, dirty from the dust but the metallic bits catching the sunlight and reflecting it back at him sharply, almost aggressively. There’s no writing on them that he can find, and the metallic part is like nothing he’s ever seen before in America
or
England.

He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong. Something invasive.

Seth crosses his arms tightly against himself, and he shudders, though the sun is beating down clear and hot. He is completely naked now, and that’s the next thing that has to be remedied. He feels unbelievably vulnerable like this, more so than the literal fact of it. There is threat here, somewhere, he’s suddenly sure of it. He glances back to the fence and the prison he knows lies hidden beyond, but this place is more wrong than even all that’s obvious. There’s an unreality under all the dust, all the weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment.

He keeps shivering under the heat of the sun, under a clear blue sky without a single airplane in it. All at once the energy he spent on eating and drinking catches up with him, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy blanket. He feels so weak, so unbelievably, physically weak.

His arms still crossed, he turns back to his house.

It sits there, waiting for him, a memory asking to be reentered.

I’ll have to see
,
Seth tapped onto the screen of his phone.
U know how my mum is
.

It’s mOm, U homo
, Gudmund wrote back.
And what’s her problem now?

B in History
.

Ur mom gets upset about GRADES?!?! What f-ing century does she live in?

Not this one & only girls text this much, U homo
.

Seth smiled to himself as his phone immediately vibrated with an incoming call. “I said I’d have to see,” he whispered into it.

“What’s the matter with her?” Gudmund said. “Doesn’t she trust me?”

“Nope.”

“Ah, well, she’s smarter than I thought.”

“She’s smarter than everyone thinks. That’s why she’s always so pissed off. Says she’s lived here eight years and everyone still talks to her in a loud, slow voice, like she’s a foreigner.”

“She
is
a foreigner.”

“She’s English. Same language.”

“Not really. Why are you talking so quiet?”

“They don’t know I’m awake yet.”

Seth took a moment to listen from his bed. He could hear his mother stomping around, probably trying to find Owen’s clarinet. Owen, meanwhile, was in the next bedroom over, playing a computer game that involved lots of dramatic guitar solos. And every once in a while there was a banging from the kitchen downstairs, where his father was ten months into a three-month DIY project. Typical Saturday morning stuff, so, no, thank you, he’d stay here as long as no one remembered he –

“SETH!” he heard shouted from down the hall.

“Gotta go,” he said into the phone.

“You have to come, Sethy,” Gudmund insisted. “How many times do I need to say it? My parents are out of town. It’s like a commandment to party. And we’re not going to get many more chances. Senior year, dude, and then we’re out of here.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Seth said hurriedly as his mother’s feet came pounding toward his door. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up as she flung the door open. “Jesus,” he said, “knock much?”

“You have no secrets from me,” she answered, but with a forced half-smile, and he could tell she was trying to apologize, in her bizarrely hostile way.

“You have no idea what secrets I have,” he said.

“I don’t doubt that for a second. Get up. We have to go.”

“Why do I have to come?”

“Have you seen Owen’s clarinet?”

“He’ll be fine for an hour –”

“Have you
seen
it?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Are you listening to
me
? Where’s Owen’s goddamn clarinet?”

“I don’t goddamn know! I’m not his goddamn butler!”

“Watch your mouth,” she snapped. “You know he loses track of things. You know he’s not as on the ball as you. Not since –”

She didn’t finish her sentence. Didn’t even trail off, just stopped dead. Seth didn’t need to ask what she meant.

“I haven’t seen it,” he said, “but I still don’t see why I have to come and just sit there.”

His mother spoke with angry patience, enunciating every syllable. “Be. Cause. I. Want. To. Go. For. A. Run.” She dangled the running shoes she was holding. “I get precious little time to myself as it is, and you know Owen gets upset if he’s left there alone with Miss Baker –”

“He’s fine,” Seth said. “He puts it on because he likes the attention.”

His mother sucked in her breath. “Seth –”

“If I do it, can I stay over at Gudmund’s tonight?”

She paused. His mother didn’t like Gudmund much, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain herself. “I don’t even like his name,” he’d overheard her saying to his father one night in the next room. “What kind of name is Gudmund? He’s not Swedish.”

“Gudmund is a Norwegian name, I think,” his father had said, not paying much attention.

“Well, he’s not that either. Not even in the way Americans go on about being Irish or Cherokee. Honestly, a whole population who refuse to call themselves after their own nation unless they’re feeling threatened.”

“You must hear them calling themselves American quite a lot then,” his father had said dryly, and the conversation had soured somewhat after that.

Seth really didn’t understand it. Gudmund was damn near the perfect teen. Popular enough, but not too popular; confident, but not too confident; nice to Seth’s parents, nice to Owen, and always got Seth home by curfew since he’d gotten his car. Like all of Seth’s classmates, he was a bit older, but only by ten months, seventeen to Seth’s sixteen, which was nothing. They ran on the cross-country team together with Monica and H, which couldn’t have been more wholesome. And while it was true that Gudmund’s mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth’s own parents had to admit they were pretty nice people one-on-one.

And though they clearly suspected, his parents had also never found out about any of the trouble he and Gudmund got up to. Not that any of it was actually all that bad. No drugs, and though there was more than occasional drinking, there was definitely no drunk driving. Gudmund was bright and easygoing, and most parents would have been happy to have him around as a friend for their son.

But not, it seemed, Seth’s mother. She pretended she had some sixth sense about him.

And maybe she did.

“You’ve got work tomorrow,” she said now, but he could already tell she was on her way to a yes in the negotiations.

“Not ’til six,” Seth said, keeping his tone as unargumentative as possible.

His mother considered. “Fine,” she said curtly. “Now, get up. We need to go.”

“Close the door,” he called after her, but she was already gone.

He got up and found a shirt to pull on over his head. An hour sitting through Owen’s torturous clarinet lesson with onion-smelling Miss Baker so his mother could go run furiously along the coastal path in exchange for an evening of freedom which included a stash of beer forgotten by Gudmund’s father (though not behind the wheel of Gudmund’s car; really, they were good kids, which made her suspicions all the more infuriating; Seth almost wanted to do something bad, something really bad, just to show her). But for now, it was a fair enough trade.

Any chance to get away. Any chance to feel not quite so trapped. Even for a little while.

He’d take it.

Five minutes later, he was dressed and in the kitchen. “Hey, Dad,” he said, taking down a box of cereal.

“Hey, Seth,” his father sighed, intently studying the wooden frame for the new counter, a frame that refused to fit, no matter how much sawing went on.

“Why don’t you just hire a guy?” Seth asked, stuffing a handful of peanut-butter-flavored granules in his mouth. “Be done in a week.”

“And what guy would that be?” his father asked distractedly. “There’s peace to be found in doing something for yourself.”